The villas above Florence,
and what each one
actually gives you

The hills around Florence hold more wedding villas than anywhere else in Italy, and from a distance they look interchangeable: cypresses, a terrace, the Duomo somewhere in the haze. They are not interchangeable at all, and the differences that matter are rarely the ones in the brochure.

The view is the least useful thing to choose on

Almost all of them have one. What varies is how much of the day you actually spend looking at it — usually the aperitivo and twenty minutes of portraits — against how much you spend in a courtyard, a limonaia or a painted room where the view does not reach. Choose the villa on the rooms you will be in for four hours, not the ones you will be in for twenty minutes.

Formal gardens photograph differently from working ones

A garden like Gamberaia’s is architecture: box hedges, long water, symmetry that only works from certain positions. It gives you extraordinary frames and it gives you them in specific places, which means the portrait hour there is planned rather than wandered.

A working estate — olives, gravel, a lawn that slopes — gives you fewer set pieces and far more room to move. Neither is better. But one wants a couple who will follow a plan for twenty minutes, and the other wants a couple who would rather walk and be photographed while walking.

Ask what happens if it rains, and ask it precisely

Every villa will tell you it has an indoor option. The question worth asking is not whether one exists but whether the whole wedding fits in it with the tables already laid — because the decision to move indoors is taken at four in the afternoon, with a hundred settings on a lawn, and the honest answer changes the plan.

The best villa for your wedding is the one whose worst-case day you can live with.

Distance is measured in transfers, not kilometres

Fiesole is fifteen minutes from the centre on a map and considerably more on a Saturday in June with a coach. The villas east of the city, towards the Chianti road, are further in numbers and often quicker in practice. If guests are sleeping in Florence, the transfer is part of your timeline and belongs in it with a real figure from someone who drives it, not an estimate from a map.

Where the light goes

Facing the city means facing roughly north-west, which is why so many of these terraces are extraordinary at eight in the evening in July and flat at two in the afternoon. A villa turned the other way gets its own light earlier and loses the city to backlight at exactly the hour everybody wants a photograph with the Duomo in it.

Neither is a problem once you know which one you have. It simply decides whether the portraits go before dinner or between courses — and that is a question worth settling months before the day, not on the day.